In the early hours of the morning on June 10, Shambhu Sada, a 23-year-old Nepali truck driver from Sabaila Municipality, died in police custody in Dhanusha District. Sada had turned himself in to the police two weeks earlier after he hit and killed a local woman, Sumindra Devi Sah, in a traffic accident. The police reported Sada’s death as a suicide, saying he hanged himself in the jail’s bathroom. However, after hearing the tragic news, members of Sada’s community and family – who are Dalits belonging to the Musahar caste – refused to accept the police version of events. His friends and family have contested the police’s claim. Siyali Devi, Sada’s mother, has alleged that the police murdered her son and staged his death as a suicide.
Following Sada’s death, his friends and family have been organizing protest rallies in Janakpur demanding a fair and impartial investigation into the case. On June 11, Thursday, the day after Sada’s death, protesters vandalized the Area Police Office. Sada’s body remains at the morgue in the Janakpur Provincial Hospital. His family is demanding that the police lodge a First Information Report (FIR) before family members agree to an autopsy. Sada’s family has also cast doubt on the postmortem to be carried out by pathologists at the provincial hospital.
Although the police had agreed to employ a pathologist from Sada’s community as per the family’s demand, the hospital had refused. Nagendra Prasad Yadav, medical superintendent at the hospital, said that the hospital’s protocol doesn’t allow outsiders to perform a postmortem on a body registered at the hospital. Superintendent Ramesh Banset, chief of the Dhanusa District Police Office, said that Shambhu’s family had even signed a written statement on the morning after the incident where the cause of death has been stated as a suicide. Siyali Devi, however, said that police had pressured her into signing the document.
Sada’s family has filed a complaint addressing Chief Minister Lalbabu Raut at the provincial office of the National Human Rights Commission, demanding an impartial investigation into his death.
